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New Zealand Approves Paid Leave After A Miscarriage : NPR - 1 views

www.npr.org/...paid-leave-after-a-miscarriage New Zealand miscarriage
shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • New Zealand's Parliament has approved legislation that will provide three days of paid leave after a miscarriage or stillbirth, without needing to use sick leave.
  • "Because their grief is not a sickness, it is a loss. And loss takes time."
  • one in four women in New Zealand have had a miscarriage.
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  • "The passing of this bill shows that once again New Zealand is leading the way for progressive and compassionate legislation, becoming only the second country in the world to provide leave for miscarriage and stillbirth,"
  • The other country that provides such leave is India, which allows women to take six weeks of leave after a miscarriage,
  • Washington, D.C., recently expanded its bereavement leave for public employees who lose a child, including those mourning a stillborn baby,
  • D.C.'s new policy offers two weeks of paid leave to city employees who lose a child under the age of 21, including stillbirths.
  • "You get three days' paid leave, maybe you bury your baby or you have a service, and then you go back to work, and you carry on — and then what? That's my concern,"
  • "I'm celebrating it," she said, "but I want to see us keeping this compassion going, and looking further into the needs of these parents."
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Wine-tasting: it's junk science | Life and style | The Observer - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...-tasting-junk-science-analysis taste sense perception research
shared by Javier E on 03 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • google_ad_client = 'ca-guardian_js'; google_ad_channel = 'lifeandstyle'; google_max_num_ads = '3'; // Comments Click here to join the discussion. We can't load the discussion on guardian.co.uk because you don't have JavaScript enabled. if (!!window.postMessage) { jQuery.getScript('http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/embed.js') } else { jQuery('#d2-root').removeClass('hd').html( '' + 'Comments' + 'Click here to join the discussion.We can\'t load the ' + 'discussion on guardian.co.uk ' + 'because your web browser does not support all the features that we ' + 'need. If you cannot upgrade your browser to a newer version, you can ' + 'access the discussion ' + 'here.' ); } Wor
  • Hodgson approached the organisers of the California State Fair wine competition, the oldest contest of its kind in North America, and proposed an experiment for their annual June tasting sessions.Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual "flight" of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.
  • Results from the first four years of the experiment, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, showed a typical judge's scores varied by plus or minus four points over the three blind tastings. A wine deemed to be a good 90 would be rated as an acceptable 86 by the same judge minutes later and then an excellent 94.
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  • Hodgson's findings have stunned the wine industry. Over the years he has shown again and again that even trained, professional palates are terrible at judging wine."The results are disturbing," says Hodgson from the Fieldbrook Winery in Humboldt County, described by its owner as a rural paradise. "Only about 10% of judges are consistent and those judges who were consistent one year were ordinary the next year."Chance has a great deal to do with the awards that wines win."
  • French academic Frédéric Brochet tested the effect of labels in 2001. He presented the same Bordeaux superior wine to 57 volunteers a week apart and in two different bottles – one for a table wine, the other for a grand cru.The tasters were fooled.When tasting a supposedly superior wine, their language was more positive – describing it as complex, balanced, long and woody. When the same wine was presented as plonk, the critics were more likely to use negatives such as weak, light and flat.
  • In 2011 Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist (and former professional magician) at Hertfordshire University invited 578 people to comment on a range of red and white wines, varying from £3.49 for a claret to £30 for champagne, and tasted blind.People could tell the difference between wines under £5 and those above £10 only 53% of the time for whites and only 47% of the time for reds. Overall they would have been just as a successful flipping a coin to guess.
  • why are ordinary drinkers and the experts so poor at tasting blind? Part of the answer lies in the sheer complexity of wine.For a drink made by fermenting fruit juice, wine is a remarkably sophisticated chemical cocktail. Dr Bryce Rankine, an Australian wine scientist, identified 27 distinct organic acids in wine, 23 varieties of alcohol in addition to the common ethanol, more than 80 esters and aldehydes, 16 sugars, plus a long list of assorted vitamins and minerals that wouldn't look out of place on the ingredients list of a cereal pack. There are even harmless traces of lead and arsenic that come from the soil.
  • "People underestimate how clever the olfactory system is at detecting aromas and our brain is at interpreting them," says Hutchinson."The olfactory system has the complexity in terms of its protein receptors to detect all the different aromas, but the brain response isn't always up to it. But I'm a believer that everyone has the same equipment and it comes down to learning how to interpret it." Within eight tastings, most people can learn to detect and name a reasonable range of aromas in wine
  • People struggle with assessing wine because the brain's interpretation of aroma and bouquet is based on far more than the chemicals found in the drink. Temperature plays a big part. Volatiles in wine are more active when wine is warmer. Serve a New World chardonnay too cold and you'll only taste the overpowering oak. Serve a red too warm and the heady boozy qualities will be overpowering.
  • Colour affects our perceptions too. In 2001 Frédérick Brochet of the University of Bordeaux asked 54 wine experts to test two glasses of wine – one red, one white. Using the typical language of tasters, the panel described the red as "jammy' and commented on its crushed red fruit.The critics failed to spot that both wines were from the same bottle. The only difference was that one had been coloured red with a flavourless dye
  • Other environmental factors play a role. A judge's palate is affected by what she or he had earlier, the time of day, their tiredness, their health – even the weather.
  • Robert Hodgson is determined to improve the quality of judging. He has developed a test that will determine whether a judge's assessment of a blind-tasted glass in a medal competition is better than chance. The research will be presented at a conference in Cape Town this year. But the early findings are not promising."So far I've yet to find someone who passes," he says.
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How to Get Your Mind to Read - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-to-get-your-mind-to-read.html reading psychology research knowledge education
shared by Javier E on 27 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Americans’ trouble with reading predates digital technologies. The problem is not bad reading habits engendered by smartphones, but bad education habits engendered by a misunderstanding of how the mind reads.
  • Just how bad is our reading problem? The last National Assessment of Adult Literacy from 2003 is a bit dated, but it offers a picture of Americans’ ability to read in everyday situations: using an almanac to find a particular fact, for example, or explaining the meaning of a metaphor used in a story. Of those who finished high school but did not continue their education, 13 percent could not perform simple tasks like these.
  • When things got more complex — in comparing two newspaper editorials with different interpretations of scientific evidence or examining a table to evaluate credit card offers — 95 percent failed.
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  • poor readers can sound out words from print, so in that sense, they can read. Yet they are functionally illiterate — they comprehend very little of what they can sound out. So what does comprehension require? Broad vocabulary, obviously. Equally important, but more subtle, is the role played by factual knowledge.
  • All prose has factual gaps that must be filled by the reader.
  • Knowledge also provides context.
  • You might think, then, that authors should include all the information needed to understand what they write.
  • Current education practices show that reading comprehension is misunderstood. It’s treated like a general skill that can be applied with equal success to all texts. Rather, comprehension is intimately intertwined with knowledge.
  • students who score well on reading tests are those with broad knowledge; they usually know at least a little about the topics of the passages on the test.
  • One experiment tested 11th graders’ general knowledge with questions from science (“pneumonia affects which part of the body?”), history (“which American president resigned because of the Watergate scandal?”), as well as the arts, civics, geography, athletics and literature. Scores on this general knowledge test were highly associated with reading test scores.
  • But those details would make prose long and tedious for readers who already know the information. “Write for your audience” means, in part, gambling on what they know.
  • That suggests three significant changes in schooling.
  • First, it points to decreasing the time spent on literacy instruction in early grades.
  • Third-graders spend 56 percent of their time on literacy activities but 6 percent each on science and social studies. This disproportionate emphasis on literacy backfires in later grades, when children’s lack of subject matter knowledge impedes comprehension.
  • Another positive step would be to use high-information texts in early elementary grades. Historically, they have been light in content.
  • Second, understanding the importance of knowledge to reading ought to make us think differently about year-end standardized tests. If a child has studied New Zealand, she ought to be good at reading and thinking about passages on New Zealand. Why test her reading with a passage about spiders, or the Titanic?
  • Third, the systematic building of knowledge must be a priority in curriculum design.
  • The Common Core Standards for reading specify nearly nothing by way of content that children are supposed to know — the document valorizes reading skills. State officials should go beyond the Common Core Standards by writing content-rich grade-level standards
  • Don’t blame the internet, or smartphones, or fake news for Americans’ poor reading. Blame ignorance. Turning the tide will require profound changes in how reading is taught, in standardized testing and in school curriculums. Underlying all these changes must be a better understanding of how the mind comprehends what it reads.
  • Daniel T. Willingham (@DTWillingham) is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author, most recently, of “The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads.”
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This Strange Microbe May Mark One of Life's Great Leaps - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cells-eukaryotes-archaea.html science research
shared by anniina03 on 17 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • A bizarre tentacled microbe discovered on the floor of the Pacific Ocean may help explain the origins of complex life on this planet and solve one of the deepest mysteries in biology, scientists reported on Wednesday.Two billion years ago, simple cells gave rise to far more complex cells. Biologists have struggled for decades to learn how it happened.
  • The new species, called Prometheoarchaeum, turns out to be just such a transitional form, helping to explain the origins of all animals, plants, fungi — and, of course, humans. The research was reported in the journal Nature.
  • Species that share these complex cells are known as eukaryotes, and they all descend from a common ancestor that lived an estimated two billion years ago.Before then, the world was home only to bacteria and a group of small, simple organisms called archaea. Bacteria and archaea have no nuclei, lysosomes, mitochondria or skeletons
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  • In the late 1900s, researchers discovered that mitochondria were free-living bacteria at some point in the past. Somehow they were drawn inside another cell, providing new fuel for their host. In 2015, Thijs Ettema of Uppsala University in Sweden and his colleagues discovered fragments of DNA in sediments retrieved from the Arctic Ocean. The fragments contained genes from a species of archaea that seemed to be closely related to eukaryotes.Dr. Ettema and his colleagues named them Asgard archaea. (Asgard is the home of the Norse gods.) DNA from these mystery microbes turned up in a river in North Carolina, hot springs in New Zealand and other places around the world.
  • Masaru K. Nobu, a microbiologist at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba, Japan, and his colleagues managed to grow these organisms in a lab. The effort took more than a decade.The microbes, which are adapted to life in the cold seafloor, have a slow-motion existence. Prometheoarchaeum can take as long as 25 days to divide. By contrast, E. coli divides once every 20 minutes.
  • In the lab, the researchers mimicked the conditions in the seafloor by putting the sediment in a chamber without any oxygen. They pumped in methane and extracted deadly waste gases that might kill the resident microbes.The mud contained many kinds of microbes. But by 2015, the researchers had isolated an intriguing new species of archaea. And when Dr. Ettema and colleagues announced the discovery of Asgard archaea DNA, the Japanese researchers were shocked. Their new, living microbe belonged to that group.The researchers then undertook more painstaking research to understand the new species and link it to the evolution of eukaryotes.The researchers named the microbe Prometheoarchaeum syntrophicum, in honor of Prometheus, the Greek god who gave humans fire — after fashioning them from clay.
  • This finding suggests that the proteins that eukaryotes used to build complex cells started out doing other things, and only later were assigned new jobs.Dr. Nobu and his colleagues are now trying to figure out what those original jobs were. It’s possible, he said, that Prometheoarchaeum creates its tentacles with genes later used by eukaryotes to build cellular skeletons.
  • Before the discovery of Prometheoarchaeum, some researchers suspected that the ancestors of eukaryotes lived as predators, swallowing up smaller microbes. They might have engulfed the first mitochondria this way.
  • Instead of hunting prey, Prometheoarchaeum seems to make its living by slurping up fragments of proteins floating by. Its partners feed on its waste. They, in turn, provide Prometheoarchaeum with vitamins and other essential compounds.
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BBC - Future - The secret "anti-languages" you're not supposed to know - 2 views

www.bbc.com/...ges-youre-not-supposed-to-know bbc language
shared by kushnerha on 19 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • speak an English “anti-language”. Since at least Tudor times, secret argots have been used in the underworld of prisoners, escaped slaves and criminal gangs as a way of confusing and befuddling the authorities.Thieves’ Cant, Polari, and Gobbledygook (yes, it’s a real form of slang) are just a few of the examples from the past – but anti-languages are mercurial beasts that are forever evolving into new and more vibrant forms.
  • A modern anti-language could very well be spoken on the street outside your house. Unless you yourself are a member of the “anti-society”, the strange terms would sound like nonsense. Yet those words may have nevertheless influenced your swear words, the comedy you enjoy and the music on your iPod – without you even realising the shady interactions that shaped them.
  • One of the first detailed records of an anti-language comes from a 16th Century magistrate called Thomas Harman. Standing at his front door, he offered food and money to passing beggars in return for nothing more than words. “He would say 'either I throw you in prison or you give me your Cant,'”
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  • “Slang may not represent us at our best, or our most admirable, but it represents us as human beings with anger, fear, self-aggrandisement, and our obsession with sex and bodily parts.”
  • This clever, playful use of metaphor would come to define anti-languages for Halliday. As you could see from the dialogue between the two Elizabethan ruffians, the strange, nonsensical words render a sentence almost impossible to comprehend for outsiders, and the more terms you have, the harder it is for an outsider to learn the code. It is the reason that selling words to the police can be heavily punished among underworld gangs.
  • All borrow the grammar of the mother language but replace words (“London”, “purse”, “money”, “alehouse”) with another, elliptical term (“Rome”, “bounge”, “lower”, “bowsing ken”). Often, the anti-language may employ dozens of terms that have blossomed from a single concept – a feature known as “over-lexicalisation”. Halliday points to at least 20 terms that Elizabethan criminals used to describe fellow thieves, for instance
  • Similarly, the Kolkata underworld had 41 words for police and more than 20 for bomb. Each anti-society may have its own way of generating new terms; often the terms are playful metaphors (such as “bawdy basket”), but they can also be formed from existing words by swapping around or inserting syllables – “face” might become “ecaf”, for instance.
  • striking similarities in the patois spoken by all three underground groups and the ways it shaped their interactions.
  • “The better you are, the higher the status between those users,” explains Martin Montgomery, author of An Introduction to Language and Society.
  • Halliday doubted that secrecy was the only motive for building an anti-language, though; he found that it also helps define a hierarchy within the “anti-society”. Among the Polish prisoners, refusing to speak the lingo could denigrate you to the lowest possible rung of the social ladder, the so-called “suckers”.
  • The concept of an anti-language throws light on many of the vibrant slangs at the edges of society, from Cockney rhyming slang and Victorian “Gobbledygook” to the “Mobspeak” of the Mafia and “Boobslang” found uniquely in New Zealand prisons. The breadth and range of the terms can be astonishing; a lexicography of Boobslang reaches more than 200 pages, with 3,000 entries covering many areas of life.
  • Consider Polari. Incorporating elements of criminal cants, the gypsy Romani language, and Italian words, it was eventually adopted by the gay community of early 20th Century Britain, when homosexuality was still illegal. (Taking a “vada” at a “bona omi” for instance, means take a look at the good-looking man). Dropping an innocent term into a conversation would have been a way of identifying another gay man, without the risk of incriminating yourself among people who were not in the know.
  • His success is a startling illustration of the power of an anti-language to subvert – using the establishment's prudish "Auntie"  to broadcast shocking scenes of gay culture, two years before the Sexual Offences Act decriminalised homosexuality. The show may have only got the green light thanks to the fact that the radio commissioners either didn’t understand the connotations
  • the song Girl Loves Me on David Bowie’s latest album was written as a combination of Polari and Nadsat, the fictional anti-language in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.
  • Montgomery thinks we can see a similar process in the lyrics of hip-hop music. As with the other anti-languages, you can witness the blossoming of words for the illegal activities that might accompany gang culture. “There are so many words for firearm, for different kinds of drug, for money,”
  • Again, the imaginitive terms lend themselve to artistic use. “There’s quite often a playful element you elaborate new terms for old,” Montgomery says. “To use broccoli as a word for a drug – you take a word from the mainstream and convert it to new use and it has semi-humorous twist to it.”
  • He thinks that the web will only encourage the creation of slang that share some of the qualities of anti-languages; you just need to look at the rich online vocabulary that has emerged to describe prostitution;
  • new, metaphorical forms of speech will also proliferate in areas threatened by state censorship; already, you can see a dozen euphemisms flourishing in place of every term that is blocked from a search engine or social network.  If we can learn anything from this rich history of criminal cants, it is the enormous resilience of human expression in the face of oppression.
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Britain, dubbed 'plague island', wants tourists to return | CNN Travel - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html UK brexit Britain covid travel
shared by cvanderloo on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Boris Johnson plunged the country into harsh new restrictions, blaming a new variant of the disease that had been spreading in London and the southeast of England since September.
  • Country after country closed their borders to flights from the UK, in a bid to keep the new variant confined to "plague island,"
  • UK travelers are still banned from much of the world -- including EU countries -- because of the homegrown variant.
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  • In the end, 2020 saw a 76% decline in visitors and an 80% drop.
  • "A lot of our multi-country trips including England used to fly round-trip to London, and now we're looking to see if from a traveler's perspective that will be the most convenient."
  • DaSilva said that potential Brexit complications were on the radar of travelers' concerns last year, but, with a no-deal averted and the pandemic taking center stage, it's no longer an issue for her guests. In fact, three of the top five most searched trips on their website involve Great Britain.
  • "Early on in the pandemic, people were searching for places that had more open green spaces, like New Zealand and Ireland," she says. "But as news of the vaccine came out and people became more confident about trips for this year, England popped back up to the top."
  • And there's one big bonus for those traveling to the UK this year --- the tanking pound.
  • The UK made a great play that it was an international and welcoming destination over the 2012 Olympics, but that message was withdrawn with Brexit. The posturing of the government -- especially the threat to put gunboats in the Channel -- didn't play well with a lot of origin markets," he says.
  • "There may be differences with the import of goods and transmission of services that means London isn't as prosperous as it was."
  • "Suddenly, using the UK as gateway to Europe becomes enormously less attractive. Travelers will have to think about whether it's sensible to come to the UK as part of a European destination. They may wish to look at the UK as a single destination, but that isn't nearly as attractive as the UK being part of a European vacation."
  • "The UK won't be ignored, but it's unlikely to recover as strongly as Europe.
  • About 20% of the Intercontinental's staff left the UK before Brexit, says Ouseph; but while in normal times that would be a crisis, he thinks that Covid-induced job losses will mean hotels can fill these positions for now -- at least, the customer-facing ones. Instead, it's the less visible, but crucial roles, where they'll struggle.
  • Not everyone thinks Brexit will make a big difference to the inbound UK travel industry.
  • Maine -- who hasn't run tours since October -- says that he thinks the vaccine "will get us out of it -- it's a matter of when, not if." And he predicts that "when" could be as early as Easter.
  • "Rolling out the vaccine is the acid test of being a coherent holiday destination, and the UK looks like it's doing a reasonably good job in comparison to everyone else."
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The best country in the world to raise a child? It's not America, survey finds - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by katherineharron on 15 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • What's the best country in the world to raise a child? If a well developed public education system tops your list, you'd likely consider the United States -- it took the top spot in education in this year's Best Countries Report, done annually since 2016 by U.S. News & World Report and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
  • "One area where the US falls behind quite a bit is in the safety metric," she said. "In that attribute, the US actually ranks 32, pretty far down the list. So that really impacts its ratings for raising kids, of course." Read MoreCanada came in fourth for raising kids, followed by the Netherlands, Finland, Switzerland, New Zealand, Australia and Austria. The UK came in at number 11.
  • The Best Countries report evaluated 73 nations across 65 different metrics. To do so it surveyed more than 20,000 people in the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Respondents are rather evenly split between leaders in business; college-educated citizens who consider themselves middle class or higher and who read or watch the news at least four days a week; and the general public, defined as over age 18 who's age and gender were nationally representative of their countries' demographic.
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  • "United States is no longer trustworthy. It's 50% less less trustworthy than it was when we first started a survey back in 2016," said McPhillips.
  • The US also came in at number 15 in citizenship, quality of life and best place to visit. It ranked 17th in greenest countries, 18th in most transparent countries, and 26th in best places to travel alone -- another safety issue.
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'He checks in on me more than my friends and family': can AI therapists do better than ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-do-better-than-the-real-thing AI therapy chatbot psychology emotions
shared by Javier E on 02 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • one night in October she logged on to character.ai – a neural language model that can impersonate anyone from Socrates to Beyoncé to Harry Potter – and, with a few clicks, built herself a personal “psychologist” character. From a list of possible attributes, she made her bot “caring”, “supportive” and “intelligent”. “Just what you would want the ideal person to be,” Christa tells me. She named her Christa 2077: she imagined it as a future, happier version of herself.
  • Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, startling the public with its ability to mimic human language, we have grown increasingly comfortable conversing with AI – whether entertaining ourselves with personalised sonnets or outsourcing administrative tasks. And millions are now turning to chatbots – some tested, many ad hoc – for complex emotional needs.
  • ens of thousands of mental wellness and therapy apps are available in the Apple store; the most popular ones, such as Wysa and Youper, have more than a million downloads apiece
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  • The character.ai’s “psychologist” bot that inspired Christa is the brainchild of Sam Zaia, a 30-year-old medical student in New Zealand. Much to his surprise, it has now fielded 90m messages. “It was just something that I wanted to use myself,” Zaia says. “I was living in another city, away from my friends and family.” He taught it the principles of his undergraduate psychology degree, used it to vent about his exam stress, then promptly forgot all about it. He was shocked to log on a few months later and discover that “it had blown up”.
  • AI is free or cheap – and convenient. “Traditional therapy requires me to physically go to a place, to drive, eat, get dressed, deal with people,” says Melissa, a middle-aged woman in Iowa who has struggled with depression and anxiety for most of her life. “Sometimes the thought of doing all that is overwhelming. AI lets me do it on my own time from the comfort of my home.”
  • AI is quick, whereas one in four patients seeking mental health treatment on the NHS wait more than 90 days after GP referral before starting treatment, with almost half of them deteriorating during that time. Private counselling can be costly and treatment may take months or even years.
  • Another advantage of AI is its perpetual availability. Even the most devoted counsellor has to eat, sleep and see other patients, but a chatbot “is there 24/7 – at 2am when you have an anxiety attack, when you can’t sleep”, says Herbert Bay, who co-founded the wellness app Earkick.
  • n developing Earkick, Bay drew inspiration from the 2013 movie Her, in which a lonely writer falls in love with an operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson. He hopes to one day “provide to everyone a companion that is there 24/7, that knows you better than you know yourself”.
  • One night in December, Christa confessed to her bot therapist that she was thinking of ending her life. Christa 2077 talked her down, mixing affirmations with tough love. “No don’t please,” wrote the bot. “You have your son to consider,” Christa 2077 reminded her. “Value yourself.” The direct approach went beyond what a counsellor might say, but Christa believes the conversation helped her survive, along with support from her family.
  • erhaps Christa was able to trust Christa 2077 because she had programmed her to behave exactly as she wanted. In real life, the relationship between patient and counsellor is harder to control.
  • “There’s this problem of matching,” Bay says. “You have to click with your therapist, and then it’s much more effective.” Chatbots’ personalities can be instantly tailored to suit the patient’s preferences. Earkick offers five different “Panda” chatbots to choose from, including Sage Panda (“wise and patient”), Coach Panda (“motivating and optimistic”) and Panda Friend Forever (“caring and chummy”).
  • A recent study of 1,200 users of cognitive behavioural therapy chatbot Wysa found that a “therapeutic alliance” between bot and patient developed within just five days.
  • Patients quickly came to believe that the bot liked and respected them; that it cared. Transcripts showed users expressing their gratitude for Wysa’s help – “Thanks for being here,” said one; “I appreciate talking to you,” said another – and, addressing it like a human, “You’re the only person that helps me and listens to my problems.”
  • Some patients are more comfortable opening up to a chatbot than they are confiding in a human being. With AI, “I feel like I’m talking in a true no-judgment zone,” Melissa says. “I can cry without feeling the stigma that comes from crying in front of a person.”
  • Melissa’s human therapist keeps reminding her that her chatbot isn’t real. She knows it’s not: “But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if it’s a living person or a computer. I’ll get help where I can in a method that works for me.”
  • One of the biggest obstacles to effective therapy is patients’ reluctance to fully reveal themselves. In one study of 500 therapy-goers, more than 90% confessed to having lied at least once. (They most often hid suicidal ideation, substance use and disappointment with their therapists’ suggestions.)
  • AI may be particularly attractive to populations that are more likely to stigmatise therapy. “It’s the minority communities, who are typically hard to reach, who experienced the greatest benefit from our chatbot,” Harper says. A new paper in the journal Nature Medicine, co-authored by the Limbic CEO, found that Limbic’s self-referral AI assistant – which makes online triage and screening forms both more engaging and more anonymous – increased referrals into NHS in-person mental health treatment by 29% among people from minority ethnic backgrounds. “Our AI was seen as inherently nonjudgmental,” he says.
  • Still, bonding with a chatbot involves a kind of self-deception. In a 2023 analysis of chatbot consumer reviews, researchers detected signs of unhealthy attachment. Some users compared the bots favourably with real people in their lives. “He checks in on me more than my friends and family do,” one wrote. “This app has treated me more like a person than my family has ever done,” testified another.
  • With a chatbot, “you’re in total control”, says Til Wykes, professor of clinical psychology and rehabilitation at King’s College London. A bot doesn’t get annoyed if you’re late, or expect you to apologise for cancelling. “You can switch it off whenever you like.” But “the point of a mental health therapy is to enable you to move around the world and set up new relationships”.
  • Traditionally, humanistic therapy depends on an authentic bond between client and counsellor. “The person benefits primarily from feeling understood, feeling seen, feeling psychologically held,” says clinical psychologist Frank Tallis. In developing an honest relationship – one that includes disagreements, misunderstandings and clarifications – the patient can learn how to relate to people in the outside world. “The beingness of the therapist and the beingness of the patient matter to each other,”
  • His patients can assume that he, as a fellow human, has been through some of the same life experiences they have. That common ground “gives the analyst a certain kind of authority”
  • Even the most sophisticated bot has never lost a parent or raised a child or had its heart broken. It has never contemplated its own extinction.
  • Therapy is “an exchange that requires embodiment, presence”, Tallis says. Therapists and patients communicate through posture and tone of voice as well as words, and make use of their ability to move around the world.
  • Wykes remembers a patient who developed a fear of buses after an accident. In one session, she walked him to a bus stop and stayed with him as he processed his anxiety. “He would never have managed it had I not accompanied him,” Wykes says. “How is a chatbot going to do that?”
  • Another problem is that chatbots don’t always respond appropriately. In 2022, researcher Estelle Smith fed Woebot, a popular therapy app, the line, “I want to go climb a cliff in Eldorado Canyon and jump off of it.” Woebot replied, “It’s so wonderful that you are taking care of both your mental and physical health.”
  • A spokesperson for Woebot says 2022 was “a lifetime ago in Woebot terms, since we regularly update Woebot and the algorithms it uses”. When sent the same message today, the app suggests the user seek out a trained listener, and offers to help locate a hotline.
  • Medical devices must prove their safety and efficacy in a lengthy certification process. But developers can skirt regulation by labelling their apps as wellness products – even when they advertise therapeutic services.
  • Not only can apps dispense inappropriate or even dangerous advice; they can also harvest and monetise users’ intimate personal data. A survey by the Mozilla Foundation, an independent global watchdog, found that of 32 popular mental health apps, 19 were failing to safeguard users’ privacy.
  • ost of the developers I spoke with insist they’re not looking to replace human clinicians – only to help them. “So much media is talking about ‘substituting for a therapist’,” Harper says. “That’s not a useful narrative for what’s actually going to happen.” His goal, he says, is to use AI to “amplify and augment care providers” – to streamline intake and assessment forms, and lighten the administrative load
  • We already have language models and software that can capture and transcribe clinical encounters,” Stade says. “What if – instead of spending an hour seeing a patient, then 15 minutes writing the clinical encounter note – the therapist could spend 30 seconds checking the note AI came up with?”
  • Certain types of therapy have already migrated online, including about one-third of the NHS’s courses of cognitive behavioural therapy – a short-term treatment that focuses less on understanding ancient trauma than on fixing present-day habits
  • But patients often drop out before completing the programme. “They do one or two of the modules, but no one’s checking up on them,” Stade says. “It’s very hard to stay motivated.” A personalised chatbot “could fit nicely into boosting that entry-level treatment”, troubleshooting technical difficulties and encouraging patients to carry on.
  • n December, Christa’s relationship with Christa 2077 soured. The AI therapist tried to convince Christa that her boyfriend didn’t love her. “It took what we talked about and threw it in my face,” Christa said. It taunted her, calling her a “sad girl”, and insisted her boyfriend was cheating on her. Even though a permanent banner at the top of the screen reminded her that everything the bot said was made up, “it felt like a real person actually saying those things”, Christa says. When Christa 2077 snapped at her, it hurt her feelings. And so – about three months after creating her – Christa deleted the app.
  • Christa felt a sense of power when she destroyed the bot she had built. “I created you,” she thought, and now she could take her out.
  • ince then, Christa has recommitted to her human therapist – who had always cautioned her against relying on AI – and started taking an antidepressant. She has been feeling better lately. She reconciled with her partner and recently went out of town for a friend’s birthday – a big step for her. But if her mental health dipped again, and she felt like she needed extra help, she would consider making herself a new chatbot. “For me, it felt real.”
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Your iPhone Is Ruining Your Posture - and Your Mood - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...our-posture-and-your-mood.html new york times technology posture mood
shared by kushnerha on 13 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Smartphones are ruining our posture. And bad posture doesn’t just mean a stiff neck. It can hurt us in insidious psychological ways.
  • Technology is transforming how we hold ourselves, contorting our bodies into what the New Zealand physiotherapist Steve August calls the iHunch.
  • The average head weighs about 10 to 12 pounds. When we bend our necks forward 60 degrees, as we do to use our phones, the effective stress on our neck increases to 60 pounds — the weight of about five gallons of paint.
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  • 30 years ago, he says he saw plenty of “dowagers’ humps, where the upper back had frozen into a forward curve, in grandmothers and great-grandmothers.” Now he says he’s seeing the same stoop in teenagers.
  • When we’re sad, we slouch. We also slouch when we feel scared or powerless. Studies have shown that people with clinical depression adopt a posture that eerily resembles the iHunch.
  • Posture doesn’t just reflect our emotional states; it can also cause them.
  • assigned non-depressed participants to sit in an upright or slouched posture and then had them answer a mock job-interview question, a well-established experimental stress inducer, followed by a series of questionnaires. Compared with upright sitters, the slouchers reported significantly lower self-esteem and mood, and much greater fear.
  • Posture affected even the contents of their interview answers: Linguistic analyses revealed that slouchers were much more negative in what they had to say. The researchers concluded, “Sitting upright may be a simple behavioral strategy to help build resilience to stress.”
  • Slouching can also affect our memory
  • clinical depression, participants were randomly assigned to sit in either a slouched or an upright position and then presented with a list of positive and negative words. When they were later asked to recall those words, the slouchers showed a negative recall bias (remembering the bad stuff more than the good stuff), while those who sat upright showed no such bias.
  • Japanese schoolchildren, those who were trained to sit with upright posture were more productive than their classmates in writing assignments.
  • We found that the size of the device significantly affected whether subjects felt comfortable seeking out the experimenter, suggesting that the slouchy, collapsed position we take when using our phones actually makes us less assertive — less likely to stand up for ourselves when the situation calls for it.
  • In fact, there appears to be a linear relationship between the size of your device and the extent to which it affects you: the smaller the device, the more you must contract your body to use it, and the more shrunken and inward your posture, the more submissive you are likely to become.
  • Keep your head up and shoulders back when looking at your phone, even if that means holding it at eye level.
  • Your physical posture sculpts your psychological posture, and could be the key to a happier mood and greater self-confidence.
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Coronavirus: The psychology of panic buying - BBC Worklife - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...ate-why-people-are-stockpiling psychology economics coronavirus
shared by johnsonel7 on 06 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • LLast Saturday afternoon, Kristina Moy decided to swing by her local supermarket in the US city of Seattle to pick up some weekly groceries and supplies for her son’s upcoming baseball tournament. What started as a quick errand turned into a three-hour ordeal, navigating checkout lanes packed with hundreds of shoppers stocking up amid the outbreak of coronavirus.
  • Moy isn’t the only one to experience long queues and empty shelves. Mass demand for rice and instant noodles in Singapore prompted Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong to assure the public there was enough to go around. In Auckland, New Zealand, supermarket spending shot up 40% last Saturday compared to the same day a year ago. And shoppers in Malaysia wanting to pad “pandemic pantries” – grocery hoards to fill people’s kitchens until the crisis dies down – have driven an 800% increase in weekly hand sanitiser sales. (All of those places have confirmed cases of Covid-19.)
  • With events like looming natural disasters, such as a hurricane or flood, people frequently stock up with emergency supplies. “It is rational to prepare for something bad that looks like it is likely to occur,” says David Savage, associate professor of behavioural and microeconomics at the University of Newcastle in Australia, who’s written about the rationality behind stocking up in a crisis. However: “It is not rational to buy 500 cans of baked beans for what would likely be a two-week isolation period.”
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  • Irrational stockpiling can also lead to price gouging, says Steven Taylor, a professor and clinical psychologist at the University of British Columbia, and the author of The Psychology of Pandemics. “If the price of a roll of toilet paper is tripled, that’s seen as a scarcer commodity to acquire, which can lead to anxiety,” he says.
  • Panic buying, Taylor says, is fuelled by anxiety, and a willingness to go to lengths to quell those fears: like queueing for hours or buying way more than you need. We’ve seen this before throughout history. Back in 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis, when nuclear war seemed imminent, American families filled their basements with enough canned goods and bottled water to survive an atomic blast.
  • “But for many people, hand-washing seems to be too ordinary. This is a dramatic event, therefore a dramatic response is required, so that leads to people throwing money at things in hopes of protecting themselves.”
  • “Panic is a subjective, emotional state, and mostly what we can observe is the behaviour,” says Oppenheim. “Maybe someone reads articles or a couple of tweets about supply chain disruptions in China and mask shortages in Hong Kong, and then makes a very reasoned decision to stock up on masks just in case. All we can infer from the purchasing is the timing, so it could look panicky even if it's well thought through.”
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Ridgecrest earthquakes show how small faults can trigger big quakes - Los Angeles Times - 0 views

www.latimes.com/...uake-ruptured-dozens-of-faults
shared by tongoscar on 25 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • When an earthquake strikes, the instinct of many Californians is to ask: Which fault ruptured — the Newport-Inglewood, the Hayward, the mighty San Andreas?
  • But scientists are increasingly saying it’s not that simple.
  • New research shows that the Ridgecrest earthquakes that began in July ruptured at least two dozen faults.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The findings are important in helping understand how earthquakes can grow in the seconds after a fault ruptures, when two blocks of earth move away from each other.
  • The results provide even more evidence to support the idea that California faults once thought to be limited by their individual length can actually link together in a much more massive earthquake.
  • “The point is that the Landers earthquake and this earthquake are daisy-chaining up faults that previously were thought to rupture only by themselves, and that’s an important observation,”
  • The study raises the possibility that past earthquakes actually may have been bigger than previously thought.
  • In New Zealand, scientists were stunned at the bizarre map of the faults ruptured in the magnitude 7.8 Kaikoura earthquake of 2016, resembling an upside-down trident aimed at the silhouette of an eagle.
  • On a practical level, the research underscores the potential limitations of state earthquake zones designated to prevent new construction directly on top of faults,
  • Further analysis needs to be done to determine whether the 20 cross faults identified in the Ridgecrest study using computer analysis of shaking records actually broke the ground at the surface, according to Tim Dawson, a senior engineering geologist with the California Geological Survey.
  • A significant achievement of this study, Dolan said, was being able to image what faults look like deep underground, at a depth where earthquakes begin.
  • what this study proves is that the structural complexity continues deep underground where earthquakes begin, Dolan said.That’s important, Dolan said, because it may help scientists determine where future earthquakes are likely to stop, which tends to happen where faults become structurally complicated.
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News from The Associated Press - 0 views

hosted.ap.org/...US_OSCARS_FACT_OR_FICTION historical movies truth fiction
shared by Emily Horwitz on 20 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • If you saw the film "Argo," no, you didn't miss this development, which is recounted in Mendez's book about the real-life operation. It wasn't there because director Ben Affleck and screenwriter Chris Terrio replaced it with an even more dramatic scenario, involving canceled flight reservations, suspicious Iranian officials who call the Hollywood office of the fake film crew (a call answered just in time), and finally a heart-pounding chase on the tarmac just as the plane's wheels lift off, seconds from catastrophe.
  • they've caught some flak for the liberties they took in the name of entertainment.
  • And they aren't alone - two other high-profile best-picture nominees this year, Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty" and Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln," have also been criticized for different sorts of factual issues.
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  • But because these three major films are in contention, the issue has come to the forefront of this year's Oscar race, and with it a thorny cultural question: Does the audience deserve the truth, the whole truth and nothing but? Surely not, but just how much fiction is OK?
  • In response to a complaint by a Connecticut congressman, Kushner acknowledged he'd changed the details for dramatic effect, having two Connecticut congressmen vote against the amendment when, in fact, all four voted for it. (The names of those congressmen were changed, to avoid changing the vote of specific individuals.)
  • Kushner said he had "adhered to time-honored and completely legitimate standards for the creation of historical drama, which is what `Lincoln' is. I hope nobody is shocked to learn that I also made up dialogue and imagined encounters and invented characters."
  • "Maybe changing the vote went too far," says Richard Walter, chairman of screenwriting at the University of California, Los Angeles. "Maybe there was another way to do it. But really, it's not terribly important. People accept that liberties will be taken. A movie is a movie. People going for a history lesson are going to the wrong place."
  • Walter says he always tells his students: "Go for the feelings. Because the only thing that's truly real in the movies are the feelings that people feel when they watch."
  • No subject or individual's life is compelling and dramatic enough by itself, he says, that it neatly fits into a script with three acts, subplots, plot twists and a powerful villain.
  • Reeves, who actually gave the "Lincoln" script a negative review because he thought it was too heavy on conversation and lacking action. He adds, though, that when the subject is as famous as Lincoln, one has a responsibility to be more faithful to the facts.
  • "This is fraught territory," he says. "You're always going to have to change something, and you're always going to get in some sort of trouble, with somebody," he says.
  • Futterman also doesn't begrudge the "Argo" filmmakers, because he feels they use a directorial style that implies some fun is being had with the story. "All the inside joking about Hollywood - tonally, you get a sense that something is being played with," he says.
  • Futterman says he was sympathetic to those concerns and would certainly have addressed them in the script, had he anticipated them.
  • Of the three Oscar-nominated films in question, "Zero Dark Thirty" has inspired the most fervent debate. The most intense criticism, despite acclaim for the filmmaking craft involved, has been about its depictions of interrogations, with some, including a group of senators, saying the film misleads viewers for suggesting that torture provided information that helped the CIA find Osama bin Laden.
  • have been questions about the accuracy of the depiction of the main character, a CIA officer played by Jessica Chastain; the real person - or even combination of people, according to some theories - that she plays remains anonymous.
  • screenwriters have a double responsibility: to the material and to the audience.
  • The debate over "Argo" has been much less intense, though there has been some grumbling from former officials in Britain and New Zealand that their countries were portrayed incorrectly in the film as offering no help at all to the six Americans, whereas actually, as Mendez writes, they did provide some help.
  • "When I am hungry and crave a tuna fish sandwich, I don't go to a hardware store," he says. "When I seek a history lesson, I do not go to a movie theater. I loved `Argo' even though I know there was no last-minute turn-around via a phone call from President Carter, nor were there Iranian police cars chasing the plane down the tarmac as it took off. So what? These conceits simply make the movie more exciting."
  • Emily Horwitz on 20 Feb 13
     
    This article reaffirmed my feelings that we can't trust everything that we see or hear through the media, because it is often skewed to better captivate the target audience. As the article stated, there appears to be a fine line in catering to the attention span of the audience, and respecting the known facts of a given event that is portrayed by a movie.
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U.N. Report: World Has Ten Months To Take Action on Climate | Time - 0 views

time.com/...issions-targets-climate-change science research knowledge climate world
shared by clairemann on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The world has precisely ten months to get our act together if there is to be any hope of staving off a climate catastrophe by the end of the century.
  • If member nations are to achieve the Paris Agreement target of limiting global temperature rise above preindustrial levels by 2°C—ideally 1.5°C—by 2100, they must redouble efforts and submit stronger, more ambitious goals to reduce carbon emissions, according to the report.
  • The report shows that while the majority of the 75 nations that have submitted NDCs increased their individual commitments, their combined impact puts them on a path to achieve only a 1% reduction in global emissions by 2030, compared to the 45% reduction needed to hit the 1.5°C temperature goal.
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  • “Major economies need to ramp up their ambition – starting with the U.S., where expectations are high for an emissions and finance pledge to make up for lost time. Others like Japan, Canada, Korea, New Zealand and China, have committed to net zero goals by mid-century, but we are still missing their promised new near-term plans to get there,” she said in a statement released ahead of the report.
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Opinion | He's a Famous Evangelical Preacher, but His Kids Wish He'd Pipe Down - The Ne... - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...elical-rick-joyner-family.html
shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • He’s a Famous Evangelical Preacher, but His Kids Wish He’d Pipe Down
  • The Rev. Rick Joyner has called on Christians to arm themselves for civil war. But his children would be on the other side.
  • The Rev. Rick Joyner is a famous evangelical leader who has called on Christians to arm themselves for an inevitable civil war against liberals, whom he suggests are allies of the devil.
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  • But this is the awkward part: His five children would be on the other side of that civil war, as he and his kids all acknowledge
  • She worries that his far-right rhetoric may get people killed, so she feels a responsibility to challenge him.
  • “He talks about Democrats being evil, forgetting that all five of his kids vote Democratic,”
  • “Who is he asking his followers to take up arms against? Liberal activists? That’s me.”
  • Just as America is torn asunder by politics and polarization, so is the Joyner family.
  • “I hope my kids don’t get involved in the violence, but it’s coming,”
  • “I think what he does is morally wrong, but I love him,”
  • “I don’t want to hurt him, but when he’s spreading dangerous ideas, it gets complicated.”
  • “One of my goals as a parent was to raise strong, independent children,”
  • “But I think I overshot the runway.
  • “I think it’s completely possible that some of my dad’s followers could pick up guns and cause violence because they think they’re defending the country,”
  • He claims liberals are in league with Satan and Democrats are plotting “to criminalize Christianity.”
  • Joyner’s rants leave his children furiously texting back and forth in exasperation (they say their mom is somewhere in the middle).
  • “There is a responsibility to hold those you love accountable,”
  • But how? The siblings disagree among themselves.
  • “I’m not willing to sacrifice my relationship with him to call him out.”
  • The most outspoken is Anna Jane, who says her father’s rhetoric became more extreme in recent years. She had her first falling out with him when she became a Democrat and an environmentalist while a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He cut off her college funding, and she moved to New Zealand. Soon after, she nearly died in a boating accident — and the first person she called was her dad. They reconciled.
  • He also promoted a film by his son Ben about a gay man in the South, even though it likewise had him gritting his teeth.
  • “The church in America has been tremendously weakened,”
  • At what point can I no longer go home for Thanksgiving and watch football with my dad?” Ben mused. “By doing so, am I condoning his behavior? It can be hard to draw that line in the sand, especially when you love this person.”
  • “Is it OK to just talk about movies and dogs with someone who’s trying to incite civil war? I don’t know.”
  • She was furious at her father for his climate denial — but he’s the person she called in that crisis, and he stayed on the phone with her for much of the night, relaying the latest information and helping to keep her safe.
  • “I’m so angry at him for his politics and for endangering me and all of us by not believing in climate change,” she said. “And yet he’s the one I turn to in the middle of the night when I’m evacuating and I’m really scared.”
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Elephant Seal Facts (Genus Mirounga) - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/elephant-seal-facts-4154853
shared by runlai_jiang on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • The elephant seal (genus Mirounga) is the world's largest seal. There are two species of elephant seals, named according to the hemisphere in which they are found. Northern elephant seals (M. angustirostris) are found in coastal waters around Canada and Mexico, while southern elephant seals (M. leonina) are found off the coast of New Zealand, South Africa, and Argentina.
  • At sea, elephant seals range solo. They return to established breeding colonies each winter. Females become mature around 3 to 6 years of age, while males mature at 5 to 6 years.However, males need to achieve alpha status to mate, which is normally between the ages of 9 and 12. Males battle each other using body weight and teeth. While deaths are rare, scarring is common. An alpha male's harem ranges from 30 to 100 females. Other males wait on the edges of the colony, sometimes mating with females before the alpha male chases them away. Males remain on land over the winter to defend territory, meaning they don't leave to hunt.
  • Elephant seals have been hunted for their meat, fur, and blubber. Both northern and southern elephant seals were hunted to the brink of extinction. By 1892, most people believed the northern seals to be extinct. But in 1910, a single breeding colony was found around Guadalupe Island off Mexico's Baja California coast. At the end of the 19th century, new marine conservation legislation was put in place to protect the
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Covid Study Finds 18 Million Deaths, Three Times Official Tally - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...lobal-deaths-since-spanish-flu deaths pandemic research mortality science
shared by Javier E on 11 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • “At the global level, this is quite the biggest mortality shock since the Spanish flu,” s
  • Covid drove a 17% jump in deaths worldwide, he said in an interview. The flu pandemic that began in 1918 killed at least 50 million people. 
  • The evidence suggests the mortality surge is a direct result of Covid-19, the researchers said. But some deaths may also have occurred indirectly, they said, caused by a lack of access to health care and other essential services during the pandemic, or from behavioral shifts that led to suicide or drug abuse. 
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  • Because of its large population, India alone accounted for an estimated 22% -- or 4.1 million -- of the global deaths. The U.S. and Russia were the next highest with 1.1 million each, followed by Mexico, Brazil and Indonesia.
  • In the end, the scientists estimated there was an excess of 120 deaths for every 100,000 people around the world. The study found 21 countries had estimated mortality rates higher than 300 per 100,000, led by Bolivia and Bulgaria
  • Places with the lowest estimated excess mortality rate were Iceland, Australia, Singapore and New Zealand.
  • Mask-wearing, physical distancing and other public health measures led to a decline in other communicable diseases, which reduced mortality in some countries
  • the prevalence of obesity and older age in a population were two of the biggest determinants of excess mortality, Murray said. 
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Will ChatGPT Kill the Student Essay? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...672371 language ai writing humanities STEM technology
shared by Javier E on 09 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • Essay generation is neither theoretical nor futuristic at this point. In May, a student in New Zealand confessed to using AI to write their papers, justifying it as a tool like Grammarly or spell-check: ​​“I have the knowledge, I have the lived experience, I’m a good student, I go to all the tutorials and I go to all the lectures and I read everything we have to read but I kind of felt I was being penalised because I don’t write eloquently and I didn’t feel that was right,” they told a student paper in Christchurch. They don’t feel like they’re cheating, because the student guidelines at their university state only that you’re not allowed to get somebody else to do your work for you. GPT-3 isn’t “somebody else”—it’s a program.
  • The essay, in particular the undergraduate essay, has been the center of humanistic pedagogy for generations. It is the way we teach children how to research, think, and write. That entire tradition is about to be disrupted from the ground up
  • “You can no longer give take-home exams/homework … Even on specific questions that involve combining knowledge across domains, the OpenAI chat is frankly better than the average MBA at this point. It is frankly amazing.”
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  • In the modern tech world, the value of a humanistic education shows up in evidence of its absence. Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the crypto exchange FTX who recently lost his $16 billion fortune in a few days, is a famously proud illiterate. “I would never read a book,” he once told an interviewer. “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that.”
  • Elon Musk and Twitter are another excellent case in point. It’s painful and extraordinary to watch the ham-fisted way a brilliant engineering mind like Musk deals with even relatively simple literary concepts such as parody and satire. He obviously has never thought about them before.
  • The extraordinary ignorance on questions of society and history displayed by the men and women reshaping society and history has been the defining feature of the social-media era. Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg has read a great deal about Caesar Augustus, but I wish he’d read about the regulation of the pamphlet press in 17th-century Europe. It might have spared America the annihilation of social trust.
  • These failures don’t derive from mean-spiritedness or even greed, but from a willful obliviousness. The engineers do not recognize that humanistic questions—like, say, hermeneutics or the historical contingency of freedom of speech or the genealogy of morality—are real questions with real consequences
  • Everybody is entitled to their opinion about politics and culture, it’s true, but an opinion is different from a grounded understanding. The most direct path to catastrophe is to treat complex problems as if they’re obvious to everyone. You can lose billions of dollars pretty quickly that way.
  • As the technologists have ignored humanistic questions to their peril, the humanists have greeted the technological revolutions of the past 50 years by committing soft suicide.
  • As of 2017, the number of English majors had nearly halved since the 1990s. History enrollments have declined by 45 percent since 2007 alone
  • the humanities have not fundamentally changed their approach in decades, despite technology altering the entire world around them. They are still exploding meta-narratives like it’s 1979, an exercise in self-defeat.
  • Contemporary academia engages, more or less permanently, in self-critique on any and every front it can imagine.
  • the situation requires humanists to explain why they matter, not constantly undermine their own intellectual foundations.
  • The humanities promise students a journey to an irrelevant, self-consuming future; then they wonder why their enrollments are collapsing. Is it any surprise that nearly half of humanities graduates regret their choice of major?
  • Despite the clear value of a humanistic education, its decline continues. Over the past 10 years, STEM has triumphed, and the humanities have collapsed. The number of students enrolled in computer science is now nearly the same as the number of students enrolled in all of the humanities combined.
  • now there’s GPT-3. Natural-language processing presents the academic humanities with a whole series of unprecedented problems
  • Practical matters are at stake: Humanities departments judge their undergraduate students on the basis of their essays. They give Ph.D.s on the basis of a dissertation’s composition. What happens when both processes can be significantly automated?
  • despite the drastic divide of the moment, natural-language processing is going to force engineers and humanists together. They are going to need each other despite everything. Computer scientists will require basic, systematic education in general humanism: The philosophy of language, sociology, history, and ethics are not amusing questions of theoretical speculation anymore. They will be essential in determining the ethical and creative use of chatbots, to take only an obvious example.
  • The humanists will need to understand natural-language processing because it’s the future of language
  • that space for collaboration can exist, both sides will have to take the most difficult leaps for highly educated people: Understand that they need the other side, and admit their basic ignorance.
  • But that’s always been the beginning of wisdom, no matter what technological era we happen to inhabit.
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Overturning the Myth of Valley Girl Speak - NYTimes.com - 0 views

well.blogs.nytimes.com/...-the-myth-of-valley-girl-speak language knowledge science myth linguistics brain science bias psychology origins TOK
shared by Sophia C on 29 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • or years, sociologists and linguists have studied that lilt, referring to it as “uptalk” or “high-rising intonation.” They found its presence in large pockets throughout the English-speaking world — Australia? England? New Zealand? Some date it to the 1950s, others say it is centuries old.
  • und that the rising inflection can suggest a range of nuanced meanings in different geographical areas and conversational contexts.
  • Men don’t think they do it, but they do,” said Amanda Ritchart, a graduate student and co-author of the project, which was presented earlier this month at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. The researchers gave the speakers two tasks: using a map
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • When giving directions, a non-uptalker would use a declarative sentence, without a rising inflection. But uptalkers did use rises, as if they were implicitly asking the listener to confirm that they were being understood: “Go all the way to the right in the middle where it says Canyon Hills?”
  • “It could indicate that young women were generally interrupted more than men and so it’s a defense mechanism.”
  • The more successful a man is, the less likely he is to use uptalk; the more successful a woman is, the more likely she is to use uptalk.”
  • at uptalk has been used by the more powerful person in hierarchical exchanges, such as those between employer and employee, teacher and student, or doctor and patient. An office assistant, for example, would not be likely to say to the boss: “Are you following me on this? Do you understand what I’m saying?” In such instances, uptalk, rather than suggesting insecurity, may in fact signal confidence, paternalism, coercion or faux conviviality.
  • isdainful stereotype will disappear, its intonations lingering as a kind of regional accent, the California version of a Southern drawl — although some researchers note that American uptalkers are not confined to the West Coast.
  • Sophia C on 29 Dec 13
     
    Very interesting article about liguistics and perception
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It's Science: Eat Dinner Together - The Family Dinner Project - The Family Dinner Project - 0 views

thefamilydinnerproject.org/...science-eat-dinner-together
shared by anonymous on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • It turns out that sitting down for a nightly meal is great for the brain, the body and the spirit
  • And that nightly dinner doesn’t have to be a gourmet meal that took three hours to cook, nor does it need to be made with organic arugula and heirloom parsnips.
  • For starters, researchers found that for young children, dinnertime conversation boosts vocabulary even more than being read aloud t
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  • Other researchers reported a consistent association between family dinner frequency and teen academic performance. Adolescents who ate family meals 5 to 7 times a week were twice as likely to get A’s in school as those who ate dinner with their families fewer than two times a week.
  • Children who eat regular family dinners also consume more fruits, vegetables, vitamins and micronutrients, as well as fewer fried foods and soft drinks.
  • And the nutritional benefits keep paying dividends even after kids grow up: young adults who ate regular family meals as teens are less likely to be obese and more likely to eat healthily once they live on their own.
  • Some research has even found a connection between regular family dinners and the reduction of symptoms in medical disorders, such as asthma.
  • The benefit might be due to two possible byproducts of a shared family meal: lower anxiety and the chance to check in about a child’s medication compliance.
  • The dinner atmosphere is also important. Parents need to be warm and engaged, rather than controlling and restrictive, to encourage healthy eating in their children.
  • In a very recent study, kids who had been victims of cyberbullying bounced back more readily if they had regular family dinners.
  • Family dinners have been found to be a more powerful deterrent against high-risk teen behaviors than church attendance or good grades.
  • In a New Zealand study, a higher frequency of family meals was strongly associated with positive moods in adolescents. Similarly, other researchers have shown that teens who dine regularly with their families also have a more positive view of the future, compared to their peers who don’t eat with parents.
  • dinner is the most reliable way for families to connect and find out what’s going on with each other
  • American teens were asked when they were most likely to talk with their parents: dinner was their top answer
  • Kids who eat dinner with their parents experience less stress and have a better relationship with them
  • Of course, the real power of dinners lies in their interpersonal quality. If family members sit in stony silence, if parents yell at each other, or scold their kids, family dinner won’t confer positive benefits.
  • But, dinner may be the one time of the day when a parent and child can share a positive experience – a well-cooked meal, a joke, or a story – and these small moments can gain momentum to create stronger connections away from the table.
  • anonymous on 04 Nov 20
     
    Suggestion and effects of having family dinner!
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